Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2020

How does a sushi bar explain a Japanese poem?

Why do Japanese couples plan matching outfits for their honeymoon?

Why are so many things in Japan the opposite of what we expect?

After thirty-two years in Japan, Pico Iyer knows the country as few others can. In A Beginner's Guide to Japan, he dashes from baseball games to love-hotels and from shopping malls to zen temple gardens to find fresh ways of illuminating his adopted home. Playful and surreptitiously profound, this is a guidebook to a Japan few have ever seen before.

'Rarely in any writing on Japan is provocation so elegantly and surgically performed' Financial Times

Both deep and witty ... Iyer makes a perfect cultural translator

Rarely in any writing on Japan is provocation so elegantly and surgically performed

A must-read . Iyer at once opens up a new avenue for those familiar with the country while stoking the curiosity of would-be visitors

Insightful and profound . Iyer can nail Japan with lyrical eloquence

[A] lovely pocket compendium of oddities and insights of Japanese life ... Provocative and elegant, Iyer's guide succeeds precisely because it doesn't attempt to be authoritative

With an elegant, understated manner, Iyer offers poignant reflections on his adopted country and its maddening contradictions and shifting parts ... Iyer's subtle observations reveal a great deal about what is beyond the surface of how some Westerners view the Japanese

Pico Iyer is a writer like no other, sui generis

To me [Pico Iyer] was the complete traveller - highly educated, humorous, detached, portable, positive, alert, subtle, a great noticer and listener, calm, humane and fluent in his prose. And he had been everywhere

Iyer's thoughtful nature leads him to peel back layer upon layer, nodding toward the infinite